Yesterday I accidentally stumbled over the successor of MPlayer and mplayer2. mpv Video Player that is. One has to be aware of the differences between the projects but all in all I was very impressed with how it handled some of the video files I threw at it. It includes most of the improvements that mplayer2 introduced over the old and somewhat bloated Mplayer code and even brings VDPAU and VAAPI directly compiled in. However I did not compile for myself but users this https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/mpv-tests/ repository instead. It even includes the correct icon für Ubuntu’s Unity and brings a .desktop file as well.

Although being in beta state Ubuntu 12.04 LTS runs great on my Acer 1810t already. There are just three annoyances I had to tinker with.

Fan always on and too loud (AC)

With an AC cable plugged in the fan is always on which is very audible in a quiet environment. This can be controlled using kernel module acerhdf which is loaded by default but lacks finetuning. So all you have to do is create a configuration file

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/acerhdf.conf

and paste in the appropriate settings

options acerhdf interval=5 fanon=65000 fanoff=60000 kernelmode=1

and here comes silence! Use temperature settings at your own risk. The example above turns the fan on at 65° C and off at 60° C.

Noisy harddisk spindowns

Second thing is hdparm settings when running on battery. Former apm (Advanced Power Management) default for the harddrive in Oneiric was 128. It is now 127 which allows the drive to spin down resulting in frequent spin downs and wakeups which are audible and annoying. This can be avoided by setting apm back to 128 when running on battery

sudo hdparm /etc/sda -B 128

In order to make apm settings permanent add this to /etc/hdparm.conf

/dev/sda {
apm = 254
apm_battery = 128
}

Constantly blinking wifi LED

Well, for the LED to stop blinking when active but rather be just on it needs just an option to Intel’s wifi module. This however is not iwlagn as in Oneiric but iwlwifi in Precise. So create a config file